Articles

For many years, PLF has served as advocate for ordinary Americans facing byzantine regulation of their land by the EPA's water bureaucrats. In 2006 our client John Rapanos won his case at the Supreme Court, establishing that EPA's regulations defining "navigable waters" were illegal. But rather than follow Justice Scalia's plurality opinion narr ...

PLF filed a friend of the court brief in the Supreme Court of the United States a few months ago, in Hughes v. United States, and the Court heard oral argument in the case this week. The case asks the Supreme Court to provide better guidance to the lower courts on what to do when the Supreme Court can't agree on a legal principle. In the last f ...

Wheat farming goes on trial Tuesday EPA defends its actions in response brief filed with Sixth Circuit Critical habitat for frogs and a toad challenged Amicus brief filed in Indian "reserved" groundwater dispute Petition for rehearing denied in Utah prairie dog case Pennsylvania school boards may flout the law Siskiyou County ...

caption id="attachment_46257" align="alignright" width="300" The Treasure State/caption Today Pacific Legal Foundation asked the Ninth Circuit to accept an amicus brief, written on behalf of Mike and Chantell Sackett, as well as John Duarte and Duarte Nursery, supporting the defendant in United States v. Joseph David Robertson. The issue we comm ...

Last Friday, we filed a motion in federal court in the Duarte Nursery case, asking the judge to exclude evidence based on the 2008 Post-Rapanos Guidance because it was never submitted to Congress for review under the Congressional Review Act and is therefore, under that Act, not in effect and unenforceable. Followers of PLF's Red Tape Rollback p ...

caption id="attachment_45726" align="alignleft" width="300" The scene of the plowing, showing what the government insists are "small mountain ranges."/caption Last Thursday, the chairmen of the House Agriculture and Judiciary Committees sent this letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, stating their concern that the Clean Water Act is being us ...

On Wednesday of this week, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works held a hearing on the legal and technical flaws in the Obama Administration's 2015 WOTUS definition.* During the hearing, Sen. Ernst (R - IA) asked panelist and Wisconsin Solicitor General Misha Tseytlin about the Duarte Nursery case. Tseytlin agreed that he was familia ...

We previously reported our appeal to the Ninth Circuit in the Duarte Nursery case. Today's update is that the Justice Department has asked the Ninth Circuit to dismiss the appeal, which we oppose. This is part of the Corps of Engineers' ongoing effort to avoid responsibility for its retaliation against Duarte Nursery's exercise of its First Amendme ...

Recently the trial court in Duarte Nursery v Corps of Engineers dismissed our clients' First Amendment retaliation claim against the government, on the ground that sovereign immunity shields the federal government from having to defend the claim. The legal doctrine is that the United States government is intrinsically immune from all suits against ...